Amy Kirby, who oversees the CDC's wastewater surveillance work, said initially they didn't know if the tests would work for a rare infection like mpox. It turns out it worked really very well, she said. The chance that the tests could detect infections rose as more people were infected. When there were 15 or more people infected in a community, there was a 76% chance wastewater testing could find mpox.
Whole cities can be watched from a single sample, said Joshua Levy, a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in California who has studied wastewater monitoring and develops related technology. Almost every kind of virus that we've gone looking for is detectable, Levy said.
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